My life has always been a struggle, significantly more difficult than the lives of other people. On the outside I may seem like every other person in the world, but on the inside I am very different. 

When I was about three years old, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and that would change my life forever. This event caused everything about my life to change, and it would continue to make me a different person throughout my life. Having diabetes has shaped me into the person I am today, and whether that is a good or bad thing, I still haven’t really decided. 

Having diabetes has made it so that I can never really just let go and relax, no matter what I am doing, even if I am just laying in bed, there is always one matter that must be tended to at all times, my blood sugar. Because I can no longer produce insulin, my blood sugar fluctuates throughout the day based on what I’ve eaten, and how much insulin I’ve given myself manually.  It’s made me more of a tense person, and caused me to never truly be relaxed, because even if I have nothing to worry about, my blood sugar is still an issue that I need to keep a close eye on. 

When I was younger, I didn’t really think about it all that much, nor did I understand what it really meant to be diabetic. I knew that I was different from other people at my school, or on my baseball team, but I never really considered how different my life was from theirs. I would have to reject food all the time, even if I wanted it, I couldn’t eat it because if I did, I would need insulin. That’s another thing I should mention, when I was younger, I had to administer insulin by using a syringe. When I was younger, I would have the nurses at school do it, but over time I learned to do it myself. This still meant that if I ever wanted to eat something, I would have to go to the nurses office, which emphasized the idea that I wasn’t like everybody else. 

As time went on, and as I grew up, I started to think about these things more. Technology had advanced and I no longer needed to use a syringe to give myself insulin, I could eat where and when I pleased. But this also caused me to realize how different my life is from other people. Everyday when I was eating with my friends I’d have to take out my blood sugar tester, use it, and give myself insulin, meanwhile everybody I knew was already eating their food. Not to mention going out to eat was always a struggle, because I didn’t know the carb count of the food I was eating, I’d have to spend time trying to figure it out while other people ate their food. This continued to make me realize that I was different, I was not the same from the average person living their life. 

That doesn’t even mention the mental and physical struggles I’ve gone through due to my diabetes. As I started to think about my life with this disease more, I started to realize how much I hated it. How much I despised living everyday unlike all of the people I knew. To add onto this matter, I’ve never been good at expressing emotions, possibly that’s because I had emotions about my life inside of me that I didn’t understand when I was younger. Nonetheless, rather than talking to someone about how I feel, most of the time I bottle my emotions, and hold them back from being expressed, until I am alone in an environment where nobody will worry about me. As I got older I started to grow out of this habit, and feel sorry for myself less, but it still happens every now and then. 

Even though I knew that I was different, having diabetes became a way of life for me. Everyday was the same routine of doing what I needed to do for my blood sugar, and because I had been doing it for so long, it was just normal to me. In fact, as I got older I started to embrace it, to a certain extent. Rather than just being annoyed at the fact that I had diabetes and I wasn’t like everybody else, I started to joke about it more. This also helped me with the situation that I stated previously, about bottling my emotions, by expressing them in a joking matter, even if it was just a joke, it made me feel better about the whole situation. Nowadays I care about it a lot less, Yes, everytime that I want to eat something I have to give myself insulin, and yes, sometimes I feel sorry for myself and hate the life that I’ve been given, but I’ve overcome that for the most part and have learned to just enjoy my life the best that I can. 

I know that I don’t live forever, so if I keep sulking on the fact that I’m diabetic, it will get in the way of me being able to enjoy the good things in life. Making people laugh or smile has helped me a lot with that, because I joke about myself and my diabetes a lot. Even though it may seem kind of counterintuitive, it still serves an important purpose for me. It helps me express some of those emotions that I used to bottle up and let get the better of me.